You need to get calories from somewhere, should it be from carbohydrate or fat?

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

What do I eat? 2013 update

OK, what do I eat? It's been a long time since I posted anything about myself. Another hastily written post during Hazel's nap.

Breakfast is always the same. I melt about 100g of butter in a frying pan. I crack 11 eggs yolks in to this (I fry the whites later for the chickens!) and fry them until they hold their shape. I then pour 8 yolks for myself and Hazel, with all of the free butter, in to a bowl and mash them with a fork before stirring the mix in to an "egg soup". Hazel has a dollop, I have the rest. We like it quite solid. I finish any Hazel doesn't want, hopefully I get six yolks worth. Daniel likes his yolks just fried, he has the other three.

If I feel like it, I have a creamy cocoa, ie about 4g cocoa powder, 2ml honey, maybe somewhere between 30 and 60ml double cream. Usually a decaff coffee too. Sometimes with caffeine, though I tend to prefer my caffeine in the evenings.

Lunch on work days is portable stearic acid as 100g of Lindt 90% cocoa solids chocolate. Sometimes with 100g macadamias, sometimes not. Occasionally 300ml of soured cream along side some chocolate.

Supper is a meal. It varies a lot. If you scroll down the index to the set of posts starting with "Food" you get the idea of the sort of things I eat for a main meal. I have been known to eat green leaves with supper. I have been known to eat parsnip chips. I have been known to have gluten free home made cake for desert under a centimetre of butter or drowned in soured cream. If fat has been a little low with supper I might make ice cream with just a little added sugar. Or rhubarb baked in cream and flavoured with cinnamon. Or another creamy cocoa.

Alcohol, some. I like dry wine and gluten free beer. Never a huge amount.

I don't weigh any food nowadays (I went through the Fitday kick years ago), especially since the digital scales passed away. I weigh myself about once a year. My jeans are 28" waist, depending where I buy them.

There are oddities that need to be borne in mind, ie that I have never been overweight. I eat this way as a result of an accident at an anaesthesia meeting, chatting with a friend who had dropped from 18 stone to 12 stone on Atkins induction. I had just discovered Pubmed and devoured studies voraciously.

It didn't take long to realise that Kwasniewski's Optimal Diet was where I wanted to go. I don't eat enough offal and I don't make enough bone broths, but otherwise I keep fairly close. My biggest transgression is excess protein.

Quite why excess protein is bad is interesting. If you read the DNA chapter in Nick Lane's "Life Ascending" it brings home quite how closely integrated amino acid metabolism is to the TCA. It's way too complex to see how any given protein would interact, so aiming for high grade low quantity is how I work, when practical. If you eat more than you need it goes in to the TCA.

In my Fitday days I used to run at around 2000kcal/day for weight stability but I probably run a fair bit higher than than nowadays, most days. But no two days are the same and there is far too much to enjoy in life without agonising over +/- 5g of butter.

Is it worth it? Well, I sort of forget that eating this way is odd. You have to giggle at the nurses with their little tubs of salad and half an apple but they're just kiddies... But I went from being early middle aged to pretty much how I felt as a teenager, once I had adapted (full adaptation took me about 6 months). I don't feel I have changed much, beyond the needs of a second family, in the last 10 years healthwise. Beard is a little greyer.

I feel well. You sort of forget what it used to be like to need to eat NOW. And to fall asleep for three hours after a huge bowl of rice before being awake half the night. Anyone with a bad back will be very familiar with using one foot to pull your underwear up the other leg to where you can actually reach it without bending down. All gone, along with the little pot belly.

I have no expectation of living for ever. But I have no intention to going back to where I was at 40 years of age. Aging un-noticed would be nice. When you find something which works this well you don't throw it away.

69 comments:

Interesting Peter. I too have had some problems with excess protein with my wife's NIDDM. It causes a drift from ketosis that reflects in the fasting BG's.

As an 'eggchondriac' I have found lining a muffin tin with thin ham, adding grated hard cheese and then two egg yolks and baking at 180 for about 8 mins is a hearty meal (if you have two or three) and has helped to get this back on track.

How would you define excess protein? I imagine it depends highly on age, gender, musculature, etc., but is there a biological marker for excess protein intake? Maybe blood nitrogen imbalance, or inability to maintain ketosis?

Thanks for sharing this. Hazel is a very lucky babe IMO. I too wonder .. is it that eating primarily fat just meets our nutritional needs so efficiently that we eat less overall and eat less often.(?) I'm going to check that Nick Lane book out from the library.

I ended up in an ambulance last year from a migraine headache (the only one I've ever had) and ensuing vomiting. A police officer called the paramedics, who jogged my memory about what I'd been eating. I realized I'd felt ill with a headache every time I drank almond milk laced with carrageenan. And something hadn't been right with my stomach. I stopped drinking almond milk and the problems went away.

As an aside .. (this comment may belong on the previous post .. or on woo's post .. I dunno!!) The only Atkins book I've read is the original 1972 version, (library on the $1 reject shelf! ) which is quite dated and charmingly so. The info comes across to me as based on his practical experience from treating hundreds of people in his clinic.

IMO he doesn't seem to have any clue that 'the Vogue Diet' as it was then known was going to be an insane best seller, or even how contrary his advise was. He talks about some random recipe for 'whoopie nums nums' or something being what make 'his' diet special!

For people who can't get into ketosis (I can easily) he had them do the 'fat fast' which was quantity controlled as well. So maybe as a person who responds well to normal LC, I just can't relate to a true need to restrict protein for weight loss. Just like many people can't relate to a need to restrict carbs to lose in the first place.

I think the whole "how much?" protein question is an interesting one. I IF in the 1/24hrs sense and if I go "zero" carb I develop hypoglycaemia symptoms at <120g protein/day.

I currently eat VLC and consume 100-110g protein/day and am generally OK as long as I don't do anything silly like consume alcohol, to the extent that I now pre-emptively consume carbs if I know I'm going to be drinking.

Re the chooks, I have some that're about 13 weeks old and their diet is starting to expand in terms of variety. Do you go out of your way to feed yours something in particular (besides the egg whites), or do they just get the kitchen scraps? I dug up some worms for them but they just looked at me, confused. They go mad for cockroaches.

Re the nurses - I have some colleagues who've individually weighed and labelled meals in the fridge because they're on one of the many '$800bloodtestsowecantellyoutostarveyourself' diets. Intriguing.

I enjoyed reading the peter diet. It was even more extreme than I pictured :D

I too eat chocolate for meals although I use 87% from trader joes due to superior taste/texture and cost (1.49 for a 100gm bar). I try not to eat real meals before the end of the day; opting instead to have small snacks and consume the other 50+ percentof my calories before bed. Fasting is problematic but semifasting is hugely beneficial for me.

Breakfast for me is usually 10-20gms of chocolate and some kind of nuts. Today I ate about 15gms chocolate and 40gms macadamias. Sometimes almonds and sometimes peanuts.

I could never stick to protein requirements that low; would feel fatigued and hungry and lose muscle mass. I agree excess protein is bad though. Try to stay around 90gms.

I start to lose wt if I eat below 1800ish calories but i seem to be able to eat like a major fat horse and barely gain. Ketosis is great like that.

Regarding nurses diets, a lot of 20 year olds will eat very little all day so they can drink at night. Some of them do this to get drunk easier / save money on booze, and some do it to avoid getting fat from booze. When used as a form of weight control its proper psychiatric diagnosis is "drunkorexia"

Yuo see, teh booze is full of carbs and also prompts hypoglycemic binges post partying, so you better only eat an apple before hand unless you want to suffer the freshman 50 (now days anyway).

Other times women will eat salads only to binge on cake / crap food in the evening, either intentionally or ignorantly.

Eating habits of others are usually just as weird as our eating habits, the only difference is our diet is healthy and theirs merely facilitates / justifies over consuming alcohol or sugar/starch laden drug food. But they look at us with disgust shamelessly eating bacon and cheese, while they eat their salad and NO MEATS. Oh teh irony.

I find the topic of excessive protein to be highly interesting. I'ved tried to eat high-fat/low-protein in the past, but I always have a problem of "overeating" butter and nut butters until feeling nauseous but not quite "full".

Ha! At first I thought you were taking the piss, then I got envious at the purity I've yet to attain.My hunch is that having significant proportion of protein as gelatine buffers the "excess protein' range. You don't have any extra tryptophan or methionine to metabolise, and you do have extra glycine. If you can get glycine up to 5% of calories in rats you see some very interesting protective effects against inflammation-related diseases.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12589194http://rusynlab.unc.edu/publications/1999/Wheeler%20CMLS%201999.pdf

Great post, Peter :)My diet is very very similar; however, I replace sugars with stevia/erythritol in sweets and baking. The only sugar I get is from 85% dark chocolate, and vegetables (capsicum, eggplant, a little onion). I've replaced lunch and snacking with a late big breakfast and an early big dinner with chocolate butter and almonds for dessert.

I know you're not athlete and I suppose you're not doing any high intensity activities like heavy lifting, sprinting. I would like to see this 90% fat diet impact on body composition and physical performance.

Karn and Lori,thank you for the info on carrageenan, it eliminates my cheap source of daily 1200 kcal though :/

Since the OD was mentioned, I am curious of your opinion, Peter and ofc others.

the diet calls for strict proportions of proteins to fat to carbs, also the followers recognize "the Okinawa diet" as the second best after the OD.So the optimal diet of 2500kcal should be like P72 F225 C50and the Okinawa diet P72 F36 C475

here I used 72g which won't be controversial in most diets for a 90kgs man, so we can focus farther on manipulating fat and carbs.

now, what happens when we subtract 4g of fats and replace this with 9g of carbs iteratively? (isocaloric)along the way there's many combinations of fat to carbs (the Zone formula can be found in between, I guess)

But my question is - do you believe that in this grey middle zone betwen OptD and OkiD is worse than the clean Okinawa diet and why, if so?to put it another way: if F225 C50 is best then why F36 C475 should be better than F105 C320?

I'm going to assume that Daniel is the shoulder cat. Also .. "chooks" I had to google that. The urban dictionary definition is funny. Second new term I've learned lately with "chuffed" being the other. : >

So you are saying that some degree of protein restriction has a positive effect on cell renewal and repair I think. Or at least that an "excess" which varies individually can impact it negatively, and that like ketosis there is a triggering point rather than it being more of a spectrum. Sorry if I'm not getting it.. maybe you are just saying that ketosis is the triggering point and that protein restriction is sometimes a necessary component.

woo .. if you are referring to the TJ's "dark chocolate's lovers chocolate bar" .. omg I am hooked on that stuff. So good and way cheaper than most brands. Also I looked up the book that Peter referenced above and that author also wrote a book called .. "Power, sex, suicide : mitochondria and the meaning of life" sounds kind of up your alley. Really who could resist such a title!

Have you ever experimented with high amounts of glycine or gelatin? I can't be positive it was the gelatin, but I quickly experienced an odd breakout on my chest. That one link was the first time I've seen it described as "immunosuppressive," which I guess made me think, "Oh wait, maybe I overdid it." It was probably 20-30g per day, which doesn't really sound like that much though.

It could be a lot. If it was commercial gelatine rather than joint broth, it could well have allergenic content. You'd have about 5g extra glycine. If it was replacing other protein long-term you could get deficient in lysine which might lower immunity.Here I found that glycine (2% extra as far as I can tell) can speed recovery from alcohol plus corn oil hepatotoxicity in rats:http://jpet.aspetjournals.org/content/286/2/1014.full

For the control diet -Valine was selected because it was previously shown that, unlike glycine, it did not prevent activation of Kupffer cells by endotoxin (Ikejima et al., 1997). Because it has been observed that 2% dietary glycine demonstrated better protective effects than 5% (Iimuro et al., 1996), the glycine containing diet was prepared by replacing valine with glycine (2%; Bio-Rad Laboratories, Hercules, CA).

For people who live in US -the heavy whipping cream made by Organic Valley which is pasteurized, not ultra-pasteurized, doesn't contain carrageenanhttp://www.organicvalley.coop/products/cream/heavy-whipping-cream/. It rarely can be found in stores, but could be ordered through a customer service in any grocery store.

I just hope your liver gets rid of all those healthy cocoa polyphenols fast enough, because they might hamper superoxide production after all: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0005272811002325

I like what are doing and have read all of your articles. I would like to get some tests done for a starting point and to show others what I am doing. I have been Paleo for about a year and have lost 35lb, but I need to lose about 40lb more. What would you like to see if you wanted to know what was going on with your body? I beat mine up pretty bad so any help would be great. I am looking to the Optimal diet for more help. And help from any other people would be great too....

I am also interested in the adaptation period for you - when I eat a similar diet to you (which I am trying to wean myself on fully) I often feel a bit woozy or lightheaded. Taubes wrote about needing a lot of salt to help with this, is this right? Or is it simply a matter of my body getting used to lower blood sugar? If I eat more protein it doesn't seem to be a problem, but I guess protein has a similar effect to carbs...

also, with the egg-love - I give my 6 month-old puppy an egg a day, is this ok for him?

Personally, I like to have 2 or 3 meals a day because I can't actually digest the whole lot of calories (or whatever) I need at one sitting.Philosophically I have no objection to one meal a day, it's just that that much IF makes my stomach shrink so when I do feed it's tricky getting it all in. And heartburn or any kind of indigestion is surely contrary to whatever we're trying to achieve here. As is starving myself.Hunter-gathers might have a big feed once a day or less, but they can also suffer from prodigious indigestion as a result."At major feasts , during colossal honey-and-pork orgies, participants stuffed themselves to bursting point, leaving everyone barely able to walk and with severe indigestion for days. Such "food pig-outs" are known from many primitive societies that are precariously dependent on an insecure food supply."http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/chapter15/text15.htm

Dr. Rosedale mentioned in a podcast somewhere (Jimmy?) that he isn't against sat fat. The diet is lower in fat for just a couple of weeks, and the book was also written when publishing companies ruled. He said he was currently writing the book that he had really wanted to write, and that he is coconut-oil-friendly.

There is some discussion going on around the 'Net about Flow Mediated Dilation (FMD) being positively influenced by higher Unsaturated fat/lower Saturated fat intake. In your view, is that a meaningful parameter or just another piece of anti-saturated fat orthodoxy?

Peter, what is your goal or estimate for PUFA grams/day or % of calories. Independent testing has shown domestic porkfat pufa is 32% pufa http://www.westonaprice.org/blogs/cmasterjohn/2011/11/25/good-lard-bad-lard-what-do-you-get-when-you-cross-a-pig-and-a-coconut/and one would expect the same or possibly higher with chicken fat and thus yolk pufa. A yolk probably conatins 1.0-1.5 grams each. Obviosuly there are many recommending poly-phobia, and saturophilia. But a true saturophile would avoid more than a few egg yolks per day because of the high percent of PUFA correct? Broda Barnes was a true hater of PUFA's and stated..“Everyone should have the privilege of playing Russian Roulette if it is desired, but it is only fair to have the warning that with the use of polyunsaturated fats the gun probably contains live ammunition.” of course there are many others who have recommended serious restriction of pufa such as DR. William E.M. Lands, Dr. Chris Masterjohn, Ray Peat PHD, etc, some targeting as low as 1-2% of calories. Eating a lot of yolks would make low pufa consumption impossible. Is your take on PUFA that higher levels are acceptable? Thanks for your work!

My own estimate is that 5% of fat (not calories) as PUFA is acceptable based on the Nanji-French research which tested the stability of membrane fats in the extreme model of alcoholic liver disease. Note that in these papers small amounts of high-PUFA oils such as cottonseed oil are usually added to the SFAs to bring the PUFA ratio to 5%. This is also the practice when tallow is used for deep-frying i.e. a mixture of tallow, beef olein (high-MUFA oil extracted from tallow), and cottonseed oil.http://download.journals.elsevierhealth.com/pdfs/journals/0016-5085/PII0016508595903542.pdf

And also because trying for a lower intake will restrict the diet too much, both for convenience and nutritional quality.

it would be impossible to keep below 5% of fat as PUFA if one is consuming 8 or more yolks per day. yolks are about 33% PUFA, thus even if all other fats consumed are 3-4% pufa on average you would still be at 7-10% of fat as pufa. this is the big concern i would have with going heavy on yolks. i don't think going below 3-4% of PUFA is restrictive, i think its probably the best thing to do for nutrition quality. i think excess pufa will negate any benefits of an otherwise nutrient dense diet.

This resource has egg yolks at 4.5g fat, of which 1.6 SFA, 2.0 MUFA, 0.7g PUFA.http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/dairy-and-egg-products/113/2Remember, Peter is feeding his own hens. Egg whites and green veges and bugs, not so much corn I imagine.

that resource references pork fat as 10.5% pufa. on that site you are looking at government/industry data. these numbers may have been accurate 100 years ago. But we learned from Chris Masterjohn in November 2011 that pork fat is now 32% with independent currently tested data for rodent chow dietary trials. I would not trust that data at all, considering in the case of pork fat pufa it is 200% higher than their data. Yolks are believed to now be much higher. Also the feed will unfortunately not change the pufa of the yolk pufa by much. It would be interesting to know if somebody were able to test it though.

I think that people who appreciate egg yolks should find fish eggs worth trying. Real caviar is too expensive, but there are other kinds, salmon fish eggs are more budget-friendly. Salmon eggs spread over hard-boiled eggs are very tasty.

"You feed egg whites to the chickens? Those same chickens that laid said eggs?"

We had chickens when I was a kid. We went to toss everything in the chicken yard – table scraps, what would today be called compostable items, and also the heads, feet, and guts of butchered chickens. They devoured all, with alacrity and gusto.

Hi Peter, I've been an on and off fan for years. I did Atkins for 3 years in the early 2000s, lost 60 lbs but through failing to adequately manage the resulting constipation (b/c there really is so little info out there about how to effectively do so without causing additional damage) had on and off diverticulitis attacks that forced me to try and eat "normally" to avoid constipation and finally resulted this year in elective colon resection surgery. I'm happy to say I'm back and doing well but am trying to figure out what eating regimen to take on and the low carb high fat worked well for me. I was happy but the constipation effect did me in. As I contemplate what to do I was wondering if you've run across any literature about LC and constipation. I still have a sluggish colon so I take Miralax daily and if I went low carb I would have to consider psyllium (which I detest). I was taking 400mg of magnesium which worked well until it stopped working - apparently the body builds up a tolerance.

I was not asked, but I just want to comment on a LC diet and constipation. There are a lot of LC fiberous veggies, most leafy greens contain mostly fiber. I strongly suggest adding rhubarb to a diet. It is very low in carbs, and initially was planted as a medicine remedy for constipation in an Ancient Rome) . I would make it into a souse (cook it, add salt,maybe even sugar substitute, spices,then add garlic and cilantro when cools down). I would also remove cheese from a diet if constipation is a problem.

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!